Longtime visitors to my site might know that I did some work for Gary Carlson and Chris Ecker’s Big Bang Comics back in the ’90s. I got to do a whole bunch of things: design characters, logos, draw stories, suggest story ideas… Though no one was going to get rich off of Big Bang, it was a blast. (Hmm; as I guess working for an imprint called “Big Bang” should be!) I really enjoyed the whole “comics history through a funhouse mirror” aspect of it, and contributed a bunch of fake covers to a couple issues published under the blanket title, “The Big Bang History of Comics,” modeled after Steranko’s two comics history volumes.
Fast forward to recently. Gary’s putting out new Big Bang issues via IndyPlanet these days, and on occasion will reach out and run stuff past me (as a second pair of eyes). I volunteered to help him out with some things on the current issue, spotlighting Ultiman. In the course of helping to assemble and color some of the fake covers from the old History issues (which will be seen large and in color for the first time in this new issue), an idea popped into my head for a new cover. Gary encouraged me to go for it, and this is the result!
I specifically wanted this new cover to look like Wayne Boring’s work, as I’ve always kind of liked the barrel-chested proportions and quirkiness of what he did. This (along with one other thing I did for the issue) happens to be the first new art I’ve drawn for Big Bang in a long time! It was a lot of fun.
I did a whole bunch of fake covers for the History issues back when those originally came out, and it’s surprising to me now to realize that I didn’t generate any Ultiman covers for them. As a kid, Superman was a favorite (see at right, done back then), alongside Batman and the original Capt. Marvel. Well, that omission’s been rectified now!